Stephen
Hawking, 68, has long suffered from a motor neurone disease that
has extremely limited his powers of communication and movement, but
that has never stopped him from making important contributions
to scientific theory. Hawking just finished up a three-year
project, a TV series called Stephen Hawking's Universe, which
will air on Sunday May 9 at 9 p.m. on the Discovery Channel.

In
the show he will offer up some controversial assessments on
extraterrestrial life and what it might be like.

Hawking
is a firm believer that alien life does exist. The universe
contains hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of
millions of stars, many which have been shown
to have planets in orbit. Numbers virtually guarantee
that life has evolved elsewhere, Hawking believes. He states,
"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about
aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out
what aliens might actually be like."

So what might these
extraterrestrial species be like? Hawking believes that most
are likely "simple" species, similar to those that have
evolved on Earth; ranging from microbes to land animals.

However,
Hawking believes there is likely intelligent life out there.
And he's frightened by that possibility.

The aliens in
Hawking's vision would be much like the malefic beasties in the
blockbuster science-fiction flick Independence
Day.
He describes, "We only have to look at ourselves to see how
intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to
meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all
the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would
perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever
planets they can reach."

He says that humans should try
to avoid alien contact as we colonize
space. He states that such contact would be "a little
too risky". What would result? He states, "If
aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when
Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out
very well for the Native Americans."

In addition to his
theories about vicious aliens, Hawking suggests that based on
examples of life surviving on Earth in extreme environments, life
could be found in unbelievable places, such as in the center of stars
or even floating in interplanetary space.

Hawking's colleagues
concur on this point. Lord Martin Rees, a British royal
astrophysicist, told his students in lecture earlier this year that
humans might not be able to recognize or understand forms of life
they stumble across in space. He states, "I suspect there
could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t
conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum
theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the
capacity of our brains."

How close could primitive life
be? Professor Brian Cox, University of Manchester's "rockstar
physicist" suggests we look in our own solar backyard. He
says that Mars, Europa (a moon of Jupiter), and Titan (a moon of
Saturn) are likely places to find it.

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